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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Criminals are Hacking Webcams to Spy on Young Girls!

British talk radio station has revealed the many hackers who spy on adolescent girls via webcams on compromised PCs.

An investigation by BC Radio Five Live, found a profitable underground market disposing access to victims, know as "slaves". These attackers get into PCs using emailed malware, on top of them getting into your personal accounts, they are also making money from it!

They use "Remote Access Tools", known as "ratting", this allows the hackers to get into webcams and access hard drives and personal files on the compromised PCs.

Yahoo Defends Plan to Recycle User IDs Amid Identity Theft Fears

Yahoo defended its plan to recycle inactive user IDs this week, saying that it had put in place safeguards to prevent the recycled usernames being used for identity theft.

The internet company claimed that only 7% of inactive IDs are tied to Yahoo! email accounts. The company also said that it had worked with major technology companies such as Google to reduce the rick the IDs could be used for fraud.

David Harley, Senior Research Fellow at ESET, says, “What Yahoo is missing here is that it isn’t just about deleting data formerly associated with a Yahoo account – I wouldn’t expect anything else from a ‘reset’. But Yahoo can only do that with data that it actually stores itself. Where an account is – or has been – linked with data that Yahoo doesn’t control, the risk will increase that those data are potentially exposed to a new user, possibly even a malicious user targeting a specific account.”

Dylan Casey, a senior director for consumer platforms at Yahoo said, “Can I tell you with 100 percent certainty that it’s absolutely impossible for anything to happen? No. But we’re going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that nothing bad happens to our users.”

Casey, speaking to Reuters, said that the risk of identity theft was “something we are aware of and we’ve gone through a bunch of different steps to mitigate that concern. We put a lot of thought, a lot of resources dedicated to this project.”